CityGrows platform update: Discussions
We’ve known for a while that we needed to provide our government users (and the constituents using their CityGrows processes) a better option for how to communicate with each other, so we’ve developed a new “Discussions” feature. I’m personally drowning in too much email, and so are most of the people who use our platform, so we wanted to create a way for people to communicate that was integrated into our technology. And as an added benefit, we can capture the content of the communication and track it as part of our Activity Log. Being able to see who did what, when is a core element of creating a platform that supports robust performance management analytics and transparency.
Discussions are easy to use: At the upper right of each active process, administrators and applicants can see a new option to “Start Discussion.”
When someone starts a discussion, the relevant parties are notified via email, and directed back to CityGrows to continue the conversation or resolve the issue.
Admins have the additional option to start an Internal Discussion, if they want to chat about a particular application with their colleagues.
Admins can also mark a discussion as “Resolved” once the topic, question, or revision has been addressed. We’re considering adding more complexity (e.g. tagging specific admins, creating automatic behavior based on discussion type, etc.) but as agile product people we wanted to start with the simplest version of the feature, and see how it works. Please let us know what you think!
We’d love to hear your feedback on Discussions- or any other CityGrows feature — and the best way to share it is on our Forum. The forum is also a great place to post questions and start to get to know the other civic leaders who are using CityGrows. Also — we recently posted new screenshots for the next major feature we’re working on in the forum — Subprocesses, and we’d love your thoughts and feedback on them, too!
